Multimodal analysis of the book “Vozes no Parque”:

when verbal and visual text come together to construct meanings

Abstract

The mediated society is not limited, however, to books full of verbal text whose gaps must be filled exclusively by imagination. They are multissemiotic and bring with them many messages, especially the illustrated books of children’s literature. This article is an excerpt from a master’s thesis and has the general objective of making a multimodal analysis based on the theory of Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) with the purpose of exploring multimodal resources present in the book Vozes no parque, by Anthony Browne. As specific objectives, we intend to apply the Grammar of Visual Design (GVD) of Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) to the study of images in children’s books and to identify recurrences regarding the semiotic resources present in the images. Our proposal was to work with the GVD through a qualitative research, multimodal analysis, analyzing the selected works. To reach our objectives this proposal, this research permeates the theoretical concepts as children’s literature, multiliteracies and multimodality. With the result of this work, we demonstrate how the images act in the composition of children’s stories and how the author-illustrator make your use tied to the purpose and theme of each work. From the application of the GVD, we concluded that verbal and visual text work together. The image acts as complements and extrapolations to the verbal text so that it is impossible to say that one precedes the other.